Magnifying Glasses, Microscopes and Web Analytics.

We have been talking to and working with a lot of companies this year for web analytics, and an interesting trend has been emerging with the executives that we are dealing with. Most digital decision makers we talk to either want to have Napkyn deliver ‘magnifying glass’ focused consulting on a few critical business metrics every month, or they want us to pull out the microscopes and look for new revenue potential in the specifics of their data.

In understanding these two types of executives, their motivations and ultimate goals, we can quickly see what value a good web analyst can immediately bring to an organization.

Executives who are responsible for a digital channel tend to fall into one of two types:

Analytics for performance management (macro level analysis) : Macro executives view WA data as a set of health metrics that can be used to understand the digital business. Their ultimate goal is to have a small set of business critical metrics that they can monitor to assess their online success. An example of this would be Patrick Byrne at Overstock, who says that he continually monitors their net promoter score as an operational success metric.

The best things in life are free....kinda.

One of the most interesting things about working at Napkyn is that every discussion with a prospect or new customer is a fascinating one. The reason is that every serious owner of a web presence, whether is it a store, lead gen site, non-profit, or even blog is running analytics. Because these analytics tools are only 2% utilized, each discussion we have tends to be informative (for both sides), and interesting, aligning different reports with different unique business requirements.

While every business we talk to has individual needs, there are definitely questions that are pretty standard. A few of them have been discussed in the last posts, but today's post deals with a biggie:

Should I use a free analytics tool, and which one should I pick?

This is a topic worth a book, not a blog post. In order to keep this interesting (and under 20,000 words, I am going to do two posts on the issue. This one will be on the biggest points to consider when examining free analytics tools, and the next will be a discussion and comparison of the ‘big two’ of Google and Yahoo’s analytics tools. (before I start getting emails with suggestions of other tools that should have made the list, finish reading the post....explanation to follow)

There are a few high level points that should be considered when thinking about free analytics tools: